Large Garden Harvest - August is Bursting With Food!

Hey friends, welcome back to Mustard Seed Homesetting. My name is Megan and if you're new here, I'm so glad you stopped by because this is my backyard garden tour and harvest where I share the things that are going on with my garden while we do some harvesting. So before we get started, I do want to let you know this is kind of a mini backyard garden tour and harvest because it is evening time. It has still been incredibly hot here during the day, so I am still giving my tours in the evening and it looks like we're supposed to get some thunderstorms and some rain. And lately here we have not been getting much rain, so I am hoping that it rains, but I'm just hoping that it'll rain after I'm done sharing the garden. I also want to share that recently I decided to switch up my videos a little bit just because school's coming up, my schedule is going to get a little bit busier, and then going into the fall, even though I'm still going to be gardening, it's not going to be as busy as the summer garden. So instead of doing the backyard garden tour and harvest videos and greenstock garden tour and harvest videos weekly, I'm going back to the way I used to do it where it's one week greenstock garden tour and harvest and the following week backyard garden tour and harvest. With that being said though, I will still be sharing some of the greenstocks during the backyard garden tour and harvest videos. And I don't want to forget this either, but I've decided to also make some videos regarding greenstocks accessories and how to's, but my goal is to make these videos short and sweet as much as possible. I know I love to talk, but I'm trying to make them as short as possible so that one, you can reference to them, or if you have a friend or a family member that wants some more information regarding how to do something with the greenstock or some of their accessories, I will have some sort of a video and a playlist together so that you can use them and share them with others. All right, with that being said, we need to get going, but what I want to do is just quickly walk through the garden and just share a few things of what's going on. And then I'm going to harvest a bunch of food because I haven't been back here to harvest. So I have all of my baskets here ready to go because there are so many tomatoes and cucumbers and a lot of peppers that we have to harvest. All right. So I will say the only times I've been coming out here is to grab tomatoes that have fallen because I just haven't been back here as much because it's just been so hot. Let's start with the tomatoes real quick because typically it gets a little bit more shaded over here and these gray clouds are not helping with the lighting at all. So I have not been able to cut back the basil. If you remember, I think it was a couple of tours ago, I had cut all this back. Look at how much it's grown. And I will say I've decided to leave it alone for a little while because it's been so hot. It's kind of protecting and shading the soil to keep the soil from getting super hot. And it's shading some of the tomato plants. So over here you can see there's a ton of green tomatoes, so they're not ready to harvest. I'm hoping that I can still harvest some tomatoes through the fall time just because it stays really warm here. We'll have to see. The only thing I also want to mention when there's gray skies, and I've said this before, but it just makes the color pop. I do want to show you these tomatoes. Look at how beautiful these are. So we're going to be harvesting those. These are my sandwich slicer tomatoes and they're growing very, very nicely. Now I do want to quickly mention something because I have my tomato plants in very tall raised beds with very tall bamboo sticks. Is it ideal because tomato plants can grow and grow and grow and it makes it really difficult to harvest from the top? Yes. However, what I let these branches do, the tomato plants, you can see they start to come down this way. And so it's like I'm training it to come down the bamboo stick and it has worked for me. Now I have thought of other ways to do my tomato plants and I may do that down the road. But for right now, this is working for me. I already have my beds established with my water grids in there. And so for right now, this is how I like to grow my tomato plants. I also like to grow them in grow bags. This is my Martha F1 and we do have some tomatoes right there. So hopefully we'll be harvesting those as well. Hopefully even during the fall time. By the way, if you remember, I was testing out these grow bags for the Haas cucumbers. Look at that cute cucumber. So what I did was I put one plant in here and I did two to see how they compare. And so far, not too bad. I can see that the one that has two, they're growing kind of funky. I don't know if that's because there's two in there or if that's just the way these are growing. But this one's looking really good and this just has one in there. Friends, look it. I have a squash growing over here. I'm so excited. I just hope the vine borers don't see it. They are really just, they have ruined my pumpkin plants and I'm trying to see which one this is. They've ruined my squashes this year. I am trying, oh, it's a black fuzo, black fuzo squash. I have been trying so hard this year with the squash and the pumpkins and it's just been really difficult, but I'm just going to keep trying. And because I had such great success with my squash during the spring, now I know that that's the window of time that I need to grow my squash. However, I'm still going to try as much as I can during the summer. But what this is making me think is maybe I could continue to grow them into the fall and maybe spring and fall will both be good times for me to grow squash. We'll have to see. And speaking of green stalks, look at these beautiful tomatoes. I probably should grab them. I'm not sure. And there's a lot of cucumbers and everything's doing pretty good in here. I shared on the green stalk garden tour, I'm going to let everything stay the way that it is. I may not replant. I don't know if I'm going to do anything with the fall with these green stalks. I have not decided yet, but because we have a long growing season, I'm kind of just letting these stay in here and see how much I can get from everything. All right. I wanted to show this side and then I'm going to go ahead and harvest as many tomatoes as I can. And there's these two and I have a very good feeling we're going to be harvesting tomatoes for a while. And then there's a bunch over here too. So I'm going to go ahead and get harvesting and I'll show you everything later. Here are all the Roma tomatoes and there's still some green ones. So hopefully within the next week or two, we can be harvesting some more, but look at how beautiful that is. Now I'm going to get all of the slicer tomatoes and then I'm hoping we can get the cucumbers and the peppers over there because it's thundering. And here are all the slicer tomatoes. Oh wait, let's go get the ones on the green stock. I don't want to forget these and it is getting dark pretty quickly. So I'm going to try to hurry. So before we go over to the peppers and the cucumbers, I just wanted to quickly share with you. These right here are all the pumpkins. These are the ones I was saying that are getting hit by the vine bores really bad. However, the watermelons are doing pretty good. One actually fell because it was too heavy. So I'm going to see how that tastes when I open the watermelon. It was still kind of small, so I'm not really sure, but let me show you one that's on the ground. Look at this cutie pie. And we have one right over there and there's thunder in the background. And as I've shared before, they are sprawling on the ground. That's what I wanted. So they're growing in these really large grow bags with these folding trellises that I absolutely love. They are in my Amazon storefront. I'll try to see if they're on the YouTube shopping too so I can tag it in the video. But I love growing the watermelon in here because this is what I was hoping for. And so far this is growing really good too. This is all watermelon that is sprawling on the ground right here. And they're in grow bags over here with this trellis. There's one growing right there as well as over there. There's another one here on the trellis too. You know what? My three-tier green, green stalk. We need to harvest these tomatoes real quick too. Beautiful. I did want to give you an update on the cherry tomato trellis. I feel like this year for sure is definitely better than last year. And I am going to come over here and harvest but I'm not going to do it now because I really want to show you the peppers and the cucumbers. Plus friends, look at what is growing. The cantaloupe. I am so excited. And there is more. There's one there. There's another one over there. And I think there's a couple more. Oh yeah, there's one there. And there's a tiny one in the middle. But I want to harvest this one as well as that one. That is very exciting. I just want to say that I just smelled this and it's not even cut open and it smells amazing. I do have to show you something very quickly because I realized this I think maybe a week or two ago and I wanted to show all of you and let it grow a little bit more. But remember this growing out of the pepper bed and I didn't know what it was. Look at what I found. Look at this beauty. So we're going to harvest this together. I don't know if this is a squash or a cantaloupe. I'm really not entirely sure. But we're going to find out. I'm also being very careful because I don't want any snakes. Oh my goodness friends, look at how beautiful that is. I hope it was ready to harvest. Absolutely beautiful. There's actually some more tomatoes on this green stalk. So I will also grab that and add it to the tomatoes. Now, it might be a little too dark, but I have to show you, look at all of these cucumbers. They're everywhere. Okay, I came on this side because I am starting to lose lighting. I was trying to go in the middle, but I mean, look at all these cucumbers. I mean, they are everywhere and they're beautiful. So I'm going to harvest these as quick as I can. Lastly, I do want to quickly show you the peppers because I can harvest and then show you the harvest in my garage by my seed starting section. But I wanted to show you how wild these plants are doing. First of all, look at this red cayenne plant. It is absolutely massive and I cannot believe it. I've never grown one that tall before. And I'm getting a lot of mushroom peppers, which I'm very excited about. Now these are not ready to harvest, but I will harvest them with all of you once they are ready. And look, we're getting more of those beautiful purple peppers. So I'm going to go ahead and start harvesting all these. And then as far as this pepper bed, there's a lot of, I want to say they're the Jimmy Nardellos. Let me show you. So here's all the Jimmy Nardellos and there's a lot more down there. And then look at this beauty. Absolutely stunning. I cannot get over the peppers this year. I feel like this is probably my best pepper year. And then I just harvested this one because it's starting to get too dark to show you inside the pepper bed. But there's a lot of peppers. And then I just found this one too. Look at how beautiful this is. So what I'm going to do is just go ahead and harvest from this bed as well as that bed. I'm going to grab the cucumbers and then we are going to go in my seed starting section so I can show you the full harvest. I knew this was going to be a short and sweet garden tour and harvest video because not only is it evening time, but there was just a lot that I needed to harvest on this garden tour. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. You can hear the thunder in the background, so I'm going to be as quick as possible. And then like I said, I will meet you at the seed starting section. By the way, I just realized I had a leaf on my hat. Oh well. So now we're near my seed starting section in the garage where it's well lit. You can see my green stalks behind me on the driveway. But with that being said, let's go ahead and see what we harvested today. So I am starting with the Roma tomatoes. I kept the slicers and the Roma separate. I also wanted to mention this is GreenStalk's newest color. It's called Dragonfly. It's like a teal blue color. It is absolutely beautiful. But not only are their seed starting trays great to start seeds in, but I've been using them as harvest baskets and they have been incredibly helpful because look at how much you can put on this tray and it has the handle. I also use the bottom watering tray for the slicer tomatoes, but I'm very impressed with the GreenStalk seed starting kits because I like to use my garden tools for multiple purposes and so the fact that I can use this for seed starting and a harvest basket is a win for me. And then here are all of the slicer tomatoes. We have quite a bit in here and there's a lot more growing on the tomato plants back there. So I have two beds of slicers and then I have four beds of the Roma tomatoes because I use Roma's a lot more than slicers, but I'm very impressed with this harvest. Now for the basket of peppers. And there probably was some more that I could have harvested, but it just got too dark out, which is fine. I can always go and get them later, but we did get ourselves a lot of bell peppers. I'm very impressed with the bell peppers this year. Here's this one. It's got to turn a little bit more red. I'll probably leave that one out. And then I did have some new varieties like chocolate beauty and some other ones and I've noticed that I've been harvesting these pretty often. So I'm very excited about that. And then of course the Jimmy Nardellos, I mean, I just, there's a couple of Jimmy Nardellos in here. You can see I'm peeking through, but I have just enjoyed these peppers. They are so incredibly sweet and they're fun to grow. And then there's the violet sparkle. I feel like I've been harvesting these every week. I have really enjoyed having this in the garden. They seem to be, they seem to grow very well and they seem to be very consistent, which is wonderful. So I'm very happy about these. The next thing I want to show you is the cantaloupe. And then the last one is the cucumbers because I cannot lift up that basket. It is too heavy for me. So we have these two lovelies and I don't remember the variety of this. This might be sweet passion. This one I think is the Noraday. I have to go back and check, but this one smells really sweet and I'm very impressed with this. Then we have this. I don't know what it is. I'm assuming, I haven't, okay, I'm assuming that this is going to be a squash. That's what I think it's going to be. So hopefully, hopefully it's good inside, but I will be very impressed because this is a volunteer plant. I did not, I did not purpose to grow this. So I am very impressed with this. And then lastly are all of these cucumbers. I don't think I've ever harvested this many cucumbers all at once before. This entire basket is just full of cucumbers and it is super, super heavy. Very impressed and I am very happy. What I was thinking of doing was freeze drying this and making it into like a cucumber powder or using them to put in some sort of a smoothie because these do well in the freeze dryer. Well, friends, I'm so glad that you all stopped by. This was kind of a short little harvest and tour of the garden because I just haven't been back there as much because it's just been way too hot and just almost unbearable to be back there. I've just been focused on watering and kind of cleaning things up that needed to be cleaned when I can. And so for the most part, I've just been staying out of the hot weather, but I'm glad that when I have a large harvest like this that I can share with all of you because I'm growing this right in my backyard and some of it right here on my driveway. And I also want you to know, friends, that I greatly appreciate every single one of you and I always look forward to turning this camera on. And I also want you to remember this, friends. I want you to be encouraged, stay encouraged, and I want you to always stay inspired. And I'll see you all next time. Bye.